Chapter 4: Grade 4
Grade 4 was a good grade. My teacher’s name was Mrs. Jochelman. We, of course, had music class, and a music teacher named Mr. Livingston taught us music.
The Hallowe’en that followed, the teacher got the class to go down the hall to another teacher’s classroom to watch Beetlejuice and I cried at the part when Geena Davis’ character and Alec Baldwin’s character crash the car over the bridge, becoming ghosts, because the car that crashes over the bridge was a Volvo 240 wagon, just like ours that I was picked up in on Adoption Day, except the car in the movie was yellow, and ours was dark blue, but since it was the same model, I cried. If it was any other model but the 2 we had or Gramps’ Plymouth Reliant K, but maybe the same kind of car Tommy Lee Jones and Will Smith drive in Men In Black, I would have, like the song I quoted earlier goes, Let it go, let it go.
Sometimes Melody would be in concerts in the NBYO, playing the flute, and sometimes playing in Saint John, and we would go to Saint John to see and hear her play, staying at the Delta Brunswick, with its own mall with toy stores, clothing stores, and food court, on 3 floors linked by escalators and a cool glass elevator, and sometimes then I would buy Lego toys, like their pirate and knight toys, and also, we would swim in that hotel’s pool.
Later we went to visit the Wissinks, who then lived near Charlottetown, P.E.I. and did fun things. They videotaped us singing songs, filming a movie with Erin as a vampire and the rest of us as victims, me singing Little Rabbit Foo Foo, and us singing our own jingle for Sandspit P.E.I.
Again I went to Camp Centennial and did all the fun things. Later we went to Toronto to visit Gram, which was my first time on a plane. We watched Disney movies like Dumbo, The Jungle Book, and Alice in Wonderland. We took the subway lots of times and the names of the stops were easy to remember and the ride was fun.
Chapter 5: Grade 5
Grade 5 was also a wonderful grade. My teacher’s name was Mrs. Brydges. My teacher from the previous grade got me to play some music for students. I started piano lessons with a friend of the family’s named Mrs. Macarthur, who had the same piano as the Wissinks, except new plastic keys instead of the original ivories. Later, we found another piano teacher, named Mrs. McKenzie, who lived a few blocks from Sunny Brae School. She had a nice piano which was like the music room’s piano. There were recitals at St. John’s United Church. Again, sometimes concerts for Melody came up in Saint John and we stayed at the Delta, swam in its pool, and shopped in its mall.
I joined Cubs, which started off with a bottle drive from house to house, met in a nearby church to our house, did apple days where we went from house to house selling apples, though I made a slip of the tongue: I said $50 instead of 50 cents by mistake. We also did a Christmas concert at a very old seniors’ home.